I haven’t written anything on Villette since reading it in May and June, as I have come to realize that I misunderstood it. From what I’ve read about it (which isn’t a whole lot, as yet, as friends and I read Tolkien all summer!) Villette is an early novel with an unreliable narrator. I didn’t ‘get’ that on my first read; perhaps because I was looking for some of the same themes that I’d traced through Jane Eyre and Shirley. I quickly realized, though, that this fourth and last of Charlotte Bronté’s novels was taking a different approach, and I tried to follow – and be open to – that approach – whatever it was – through to the end.
Reflecting on Villette recently, I am engaged in a comparison and experiencing the contrast between it and the two previous novels. I have not read The Professor, so I don’t know how it would fit into this analysis (if anyone wishes to share their thoughts on this with me, I’d be glad of the input), but the three stories I have read all deal – each in its own way – with self-realization and the journey toward it.
Jane’s journey is the most successful. Through a kind of Eros & Psyche cataclysm in the middle of the story – the rupturing of the relationship between Rochester and Jane on their wedding day; via the revelation of Bertha Mason – Jane leaves Thornfield and heads off on a journey in which she continues her process of self-realization. Unlike the Eros and Psyche myth – where Eros flies from Psyche after the revelation of his true identity – it is Jane who flees from Rochester after the revelation of his secret; the “madwoman in the attic” – his wife.
Jane Eyre ends, after Jane’s journey brings her finally to Ferndean (a very faery name!), in a plausibly hopeful and positive place. Rochester is redeemed through fire, being maimed in his attempt to save Bertha from the flames she had first ignited in the governesses (Jane's) bedroom, and which then spread to the rest of the house, and Jane has come into her own, as a self-possessed, powerful woman, capable of loving the maimed man (a Beauty and the Beast theme, I always think?). There is hope that their future may be a good (enough) one.
Shirley then follows the lives of four characters who, in the end, get paired off (Robert and Caroline; Shirley and Louis) and whose future might seem worthy of a similar hope until – as I suggested in my blog “The End of Shirley” – you analyze their final station in life in the last chapter.
All through this novel, the characters are moving amidst the motifs of faery and haunted places. The faeryfolk would seem to be present, if not actual actors in the story. I don’t think one actually appears to any of the characters – just as they never do in Jane Eyre either – but there is a faery ambience that touches the story (as I explored in my third blog on the novel). The characters themselves – especially Caroline and Shirley – are likened to faeries, just as Jane is in the previous story.
So, as I read Shirley I was following what seemed the ley-lines of self-realization for various characters; especially Shirley and Caroline and to a lesser extent perhaps Louis and Robert. But these ley-lines all seemed to dissipate into a situation of rather banal and the all-to-be-expected conventions of ‘progress’ and ‘industry’ by the end. I kept asking myself, after finishing the novel, “what happened to cause these characters to fall back into such an ordinary conformity to the normative social and cultural mores?” (I also explored this in “The End of Shirey”)
The self-realization that I was seeing unfolding in the course of the novel appears to fail at the end. It may well take these two couples – Robert & Caroline and Shirley & Louis – years to come into a genuine state of self-realization. I could imagine a second novel -- Shirley II – which would follow how these characters lived and finally broke with the conventions and conformities into which they had fallen, after which they reached a mature self-realization—and then engaged in life without such conformity and obedience to conventions of the time. I think that could be a very interesting novel!
Then, reading Villette, I had yet another experience altogether; one in which – I would argue – the journey of self-realization fails utterly. Though I have to read the novel again – and possibly again and again – I’m fairly confident in saying that Lucy Snow never gets over what it was that seems to have undermined her when she was young – after leaving the house where she was visiting with her godmother in Bretton; which is where she met two of the other significant characters in the narrative—Graham and Polly – for the first time.
After whatever happened in her late teens, Lucy set out to establish herself in life. Pessimistic about her options, she became the live-in companion to an elderly women named Ms Marchmont. I thought as I read this scenario that it might inspire revelations of Lucy’s personal tragedy and perhaps be the beginning of a process of revaluation for her? But it doesn’t happen. Not even after that iconic, poignant experience one night during a raging storm, when the elderly woman is stirred to deep memory of a night when she was young and witnessed the death of her fiancé one Christmas Eve. I was quite moved by the story; pondering the depths of its implications for the experiencer and how it may have charted a course for her life which over time brought her to the present moment; telling the story of that night to her young companion!
Something about Lucy’s reaction to this story led me to think that perhaps whatever tragedy had occurred to her was of a similar nature? Yet there is no textual evidence of this. Lucy remains reticent and does not tell the reader – for she is the first-person narrator of the story – anything about what happened in those years between the months spent in Bretton and when the story resumes. There is little healing of Lucy’s soul; no ultimate release from the effect of whatever it was that actually happened to her.
The novel keeps putting Lucy Snow into situations where I would have expected – or at least hoped – that there might come some healing for her. But it never comes to fruition. All of the experiences at the school in Labassecour (i.e., a fictionalized version of Belgium), her reunion with Graham (now Dr John Graham Bretton) and Polly (who is now Paulina Mary Home de Bassompierre via her father’s inheritance), her experiences at a Catholic church one night and via a growing friendship with M Paul Emmanuel—do not in the end provide sufficient transformative energies to liberate Lucy from whatever has wrecked her soul-journey.
At the end, having lost M Paul to shipwreck, Lucy seems to me ‘disconnected;’ going through life and doing what is expected—and in this state I don’t see any hope of release from what binds her. While she seems to have had a good stint as a teacher, she has never confided in or shared with anyone – expect, perhaps, to the priest she goes to confession with, one night, on an impulse during one of her wanderings in the city, though we as the reader do not know what she said to him! – and remains an un-self-realized self at the end.
So over the course of these three novels I see the journey toward self-realization moving from (1) a reasonable fulfillment, portending a possible good life together for Jane and Rochester, to (2) potentially failed self-realizations where the four main characters are concerned, though the journey they have each undergone seemed propitious of some better end, to (3) at least at the end of the novel, a state of failed self-realization for Lucy Snow.
How all this will be nuanced by a re-reading of Villette and possible re-readings of Jane Eyre and Shirley, I may only discover in the process of those readings.
